Toronto's mayor and the former Alberta premier have much in common, but Klein understood what Ford does not: media scrutiny is part of the job.

Klein,
who died last Friday at age 70
, had a successful political career in large part due to characteristics Ford utterly lacks — the ability to admit weaknesses and errors, and an affability that allowed him to embrace and respect political opponents and media critics, even while excoriating them.

I was a close observer of Klein’s time as premier of Alberta. I became editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal in 1992, the same year Klein became Alberta’s premier. I held that post until the summer of 2000, when Klein was near the end of his time in charge.

As the main media voice in Edmonton, which elected NDP and Liberal MLAs even while the Tories were sweeping the rest of the province, Klein and his party viewed the Journal as a prime opponent. The paper’s uneasy relationship with the Tories, who have ruled Alberta for four decades, was cemented in the Peter Lougheed years. The Journal’s publisher at the time perhaps unwisely declared the paper “the official opposition” when Lougheed led his party to a sweep of every seat in the Legislature. The Tories never forgot that. The line was tossed in our faces whenever we reported stories that reflected poorly on them, which was often.

Klein, a former journalist, kept this up, particularly because it played well within the party. Taking a swipe at the Journal, or at journalists generally, was always good for bolstering the troops. That Klein did it in his folksy manner made it most effective.

He once ended a series of thank-yous to stalwarts at a party convention saying he thanked them all from “the bottom of my heart,” and also thanked the Journal “from the heart of my bottom.”

When some on the newsroom staff reacted with thin skin and thinner humour, I advised them to chill out — we should start to worry if a politician ever praised us in front of his political supporters.

I knew that Klein had a great sense of humour, and thought we could position the paper best with a lighthearted response. I tapped out what would have been one of the shortest editorials on record, in which we thanked the premier for thanking us from the heart of his bottom, but promised that we still were not going to kiss it.

Publisher Linda Hughes (now a member of the board of the Star’s parent company) wisely advised me not to run that. But I did say it in a note sent to the premier’s office, and I heard back that Klein said it made his day.

There’s the lesson for Toronto’s beleaguered mayor. Klein never understood the constitution formally – one of our harshest exchanges came in response to the premier falsely claiming that the Charter of Rights would protect people from discrimination by landlords. I was aggressively rebuked by his staff for pointing out in a Q&A session after his speech that the Charter only applies to governments, not private parties. And the paper led the condemnation when in 1998 the Klein government tried to use the notwithstanding clause to limit the rights of people forcibly sterilized during Alberta’s shameful embrace of eugenics as late as 1972. But Klein understood intuitively that media freedoms are guaranteed to Canadians precisely because of their importance in holding governments and politicians accountable.

Rob Ford doesn’t get that. He’d do well to read a few learned articles about it.

While Klein could take scrutiny and harsh criticism personally, he seldom took it out on individuals within the media other than engaging them in debate and repartee. He would never do what
Ford routinely does
, refusing to be interviewed by Star journalists, or even respond to written questions, then blaming us when our stories don’t have much in the way of his side of things. Or do as Ford’s brother Doug did on Sunday, attacking the paper and its editor, Michael Cooke, based on a years-old quote about newspaper competition in New York as if it described how the paper approaches Ford.

Ford and Klein do have something important in common. Klein was in some ways an accidental premier, riding popularism to success, just as Ford has. Klein’s reputation now is as the leader who eliminated deficit and debt with harsh spending cuts. But he was initially the least supportive of such moves among candidates for his party’s leadership after the inept Don Getty had almost fumbled away the Lougheed legacy.

Klein was the last of the many candidates for the leadership to meet the Journal’s editorial board prior to the party leadership vote in 1992. His opponents had all focused on the deficit and debt, some to the point of hysteria, with dark talk of the International Monetary Fund having to take over the province’s finances. Klein spoke with us for close to an hour and never mentioned the issue.

Only as we were winding down did the issue of debt and deficit arise — from us, not Klein. Our editorial board chairman pointed out that while his opponents had focused on the issue, Klein hadn’t mentioned it, and he asked for Klein’s thoughts. I’ll never forget the response from the man who went on to be famous as a deficit-cutter and debt eliminator.

Klein waved his hand dismissively and started off, “Oh, well, you know . . .” and proceeded to tell us that sure, this was a problem, but it wasn’t a crisis and some prudent management and economic growth would take care of it.

That had been precisely our editorial position in response to the hawks on the issue and we embraced Klein’s position.

Scant days later, candidate Nancy Betkowski led after the first ballot of what was then a novel way of selecting a leader, with all party members voting, and a run-off vote set if no one had a majority after one vote. Betkowski was seen as too progressive by party stalwarts. Support coalesced around Klein in an effort to head her off. The eventual premier was told by advisers that he had to embrace debt elimination in order to gain the support of other key candidates.

Klein did that, and is now remembered for his first budget as premier, slashing spending. Much less often is it remembered that Klein later presided over budgets with huge spending increases, with only booming petroleum revenues staving off new deficits.

Klein was popular and a repeat winner because of his folksy manner, supported, as I once wrote, by Albertans who felt he would be great company at their backyard BBQs, even though he wasn’t actually going to come to them. Ford became mayor due to a similar Everyman perception, and a similar pitch of treating taxpayers’ money with respect.

But unlike Klein, Ford is unable to admit an error — even unable, initially at least, to admit that incidents seen as unfavourable actually happened. And he is unable to accept that media scrutiny is part of the job. Ralph Klein understood that, and often turned it to his advantage. Ford could take a lesson from the former Alberta premier.

Murdoch Davis
is executive editor of the Star. He was editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal from 1992 until 2000.